Baseball Season Wrap-Up

The little league baseball season was wrapped up for my team (AAA division, mostly 9-10 year olds) this Saturday, when closing day ceremonies took place. After the ceremony, I found myself placed in a dunk tank, with my players eagerly lining up to dunk me with a gleam in their eyes.

Our regular season record was 10 wins and 8 losses, good for second place in the league. I had initially hoped for better at the start of the season, but no plan survives contact very long. We played the #1 team very hard on all but a few occassions, so my players can hold their head high and be proud of the progress made this year.

In the Vista City Tournament, we won our first two games convincingly, and then lost two games to finish tied for 5th place. Our first loss was against the eventual 1st place team, and we should have won that game except for the wheels falling off of our defense in one inning. And so it goes...

So now I will have to find something to do with all of the time with which I now find myself. I figured out that during the season, I spent well over 200 hours on meetings, practices, and games. This does not take into account time spent going to/from locations, nor the time spent at work planning lineups and position charts. Yes, I was kept very busy, and yes I will miss it!

Next year, my son will move up to the Major division, and I look forward to the challenges that it will bring, as well as the improved quality of game play. It is so very rewarding to see kids I have coached since tee-ball turn into smart and skillful baseball players!

It's Quiet Around Here... Too Quiet

What can I say other than, "Life is very busy". I'll try to provide a few updates here, however.

Little League Baseball

The season is well into the second half, and it looks as if our team will finish 2nd place. We only play the #1 team twice in the second half, and have already lost both of those games. Thus, barring some kind of divine intervention, the Angels will have to be happy with a 2nd place finish. However, once the regular season is complete, we get to look forward to the city tournament! So the team is still practicing hard and trying to refine our game with that tournament in our sights.

Soccer

My soccer team is currently undefeated, with 1 win and 5 ties! It seems that all 4 teams in our men's 35+ division are fairly evenly matched, which is good. My ankle injury has still not yet healed completely, which I find irritating. I am guessing that it will not be 100% good for a few more months, but it is good enough to play on now, so I do what I can.

Family

The rest of the family is doing just fine. We camped at San Elijo state beach for 4 nights during the kids' spring break, and the weather cooperated with us fairly well for a majority of the time there. In July we are looking forward to a vacation in the Central Coast as well.

What's Been Happening in My World

It has been well over a month since I last wrote anything here, and as you may guess, I have been very busy. I'll try to catch up a bit with this post.

Ankle Injury Update

My ankle has healed up fairly well, and is probably back up to 80% of it's original strength after 6 weeks. I've played a bit of soccer over the last two Sunday afternoons, and it just isn't quite right yet. I have also had a large blister form both days on my right instep. I'm not sure if I am doing something awkward to compensate for the weakened ankle, or if it is th new shoes. Next week, I'll be playing back in my old pair of Copa Mundials and see if the situation improves a bit.

Our first soccer game of the new season is on Friday, March 6th. I'd like to be somewhere in the vicinity of "being in good shape" by then.

Little League Baseball

A new baseball season is underway, and I am back at the helm managing my son's AAA baseball team, the Angels. The rain has interfered with practices a bit, so we've done the best we can. Opening day in on Saturday, March 7th, so we have 2 more weeks of practices to get some of the rust off of the ole baseball gears. I'm hoping for a good season - it always seems to come down to the pitching!

New Technology

I picked up a new Toshiba laptop on Saturday from Fry's. At $399, it was too good of a deal to pass up, and our old Dell 700m has been showing signs of aging for quite some time. The new laptop sports an Intel Core Two Duo T3400 CPU (2.16 GHz, 667 MHz FSB), 2 gigabytes of RAM, a decently size 160GB hard drive, and a nice 15.4" wide screen display (1280 x 800).

I've gone through and stripped out most of the crap that came bundled with the notebook (Norton begone!), and installed Firefox, OpenOffice, Notepad++, etc. Windows Vista Home Premium seems to work well on the PC (response is snappy, display is crisp), and it is my first experience with the OS. I actually installed the Windows 7 beta in a Virtualbox VM before ever seeing Windows Vista, and I can't say I see much of an improvement or difference between the two versions.

Windows Vista *is* a bit chatty with the UAC stuff, though, isn't it? Dialog boxes come flying at you during installation of new apps, but I don't mind it too much. I do believe that Windows 7 has improved in that regard. However, I don't see much that would compel anyone to upgrade from Vista to 7.

A Late Christmas Gift - Not Broken!

Woo-hoo! I received some great news yesterday during my appointment with the orthopedic surgeon. It turns out that the protrusion of bone on my lower fibula is, in the doctor's opinion, from a previous ankle sprain. My ankle is *not* broken - the x-rays were simply misinterpreted by the Urgent Care doctor, which can (and will) happen if they are not experts in the skelto-musculature realm of medicine.

So, the doc said that I should try putting weight on my ankle as I could, first with both crutches, then with a single crutch on the good side, and then with no crutches. When I got back home, I tested out my ankle and was able to put weight on it with two, then one crutch. Later that evening, I discarded the single crutch and was able to hobble around fairly well, even helping out with the preparation for dinner.

To cap off the night, I was able to ascend our stairs to the second story and actually tuck in my kids and sleep in my own bed for the first time in four days.

As far as further recovery is concerned, the doctor said that wearing a brace might be a good idea for the next few weeks, and to work on my range of motion in the ankle. Running is out of the question for about three weeks, but biking would be a good exercise when my ankle feels up to it. I am hoping to be back in soccer shape in fixe to six weeks - we'll see how things go.

I can not express how happy I am to be rid of those crutches! The four days I had to deal with them has given me a small dose of insight into what it must be like to permanently live with a disability. Just being able to walk and use my hands at the same time seems like an amazing gift to me right now.

Epic Fail - My Broken Ankle

Ug. Maybe I should rename this blog to Alan's Place Where He Bitches About His Injuries...

Yes, a new year has come, and a new injury along with it. Up until this time in my life, I have been fortunate enough to have never broken a bone in my body. I was pure, as far as my calcified frame is concerned. Sure, the paint on the outside has suffered a few abrasions, burns, and general wear and tear over the years, but the frame on which it all rides was still in decent shape.

On Sunday, I play a pick-up game of soccer at a local park. After about 45 minutes of play, I was chasing down a ball and went up in the air for it. I landed with all of my weight on my right foot, which normally isn't a problem. However, when that right foot in turn lands on some kind of divot, problems can (and did) arise.

My right ankle rolled outwards as all of my weight bore down, and a 'pop' was heard by me and the player closest to me. I went down like a house of cards, to my hands and knees. I managed to crawl on my hands and knees off the field, where one of the other guys gave me some ice in a ziplock bag to ice it down.

After about 10 minutes of icing it down, I experimented with the joint a bit and found that I could move it around without much discomfort at all. I put on my flip-flops, and tested out putting some weight on it, and it seemed ok. Maybe it wasn't too bad after all?

I decided to call it a day, and then walked to my truck without too much difficulty. Some of the guys there asked if I needed any help, and I thanked them but said that it looked like it might not be too bad. One of them urged me to have it x-rayed, lest I wake up in the middle of the night with an ankle the size of a cantaloupe.

I almost dismissed the advice, except for the memory of the 'pop' sound. That was something new. So, I headed off to the local Urgent Care which was blessedly empty. After a few x-rays, the doc came in and said that it looks like there was a bone chip in my right ankle, and asked me if I had broken my ankle in the past? He said that he would consult with a radiologist the following day, and refer me to an orthopedic surgeon if it was a fracture.

The nurse splinted up my foot and calf, handed me a pair of crutches, a prescription for vicodin, and then I was sent on my way home. My wife picked me up, as I can not exert any pressure on the joint, and hence can not drive. Oh boy, this is going to be fun.

On Monday, I got an referral and appointment to see an orthopedic surgeon, which I will go to in a few minutes. More information will be forthcoming as it arrives. I am praying that no surgery will be needed, and that the break is minor.

Python Challenge

Of all the scripting languages out there, I would have to say that Python is my favorite. I don't use it a lot, but when I need to whip up some kind of task to do some heavy text processing, or pull email down from my gMail account, I know that python can do it.

Yesterday, Ars Technica had a nice article on learning python via online resources. I was already aware of most of the references mentioned in the article, but in the comments to the article I found a gem - The Python Challenge.

The best way I can explain the Python Challenge is that it is like an adventure game with problems that can be solved using a few lines of python code. You start with problem number one, and when you have completed the problem, it will lead you to the URL for problem #2. Of course, what makes the challenge so challenging is that the problems are not always clearly spelled out on the web page. At times you'll need to view the source code and decipher clues to even find what the problem is. And then, of course, you'll need to solve the programming problem.

Right now, I am stuck on #6. I solved the programming problem, and received the ending clue ("collect the comments"), but I am not sure what to do now. I'll let it simmer in the back of my head for a while before I resort to looking for hints.

As a side note, these problems can also be solved with perl and even bash scripts. After you have completed a problem, a solution wiki page for that problem becomes available so you can see how other people solved the problem, which is always interesting and helpful.

Unicode and Delphi 2009

I must confess that when it comes to Unicode, I have buried my head in the sand and deliberately tried to ignore the whole transition mess from the English-centric ANSI based character set to the world-friendly Unicode standard.

To get a brief background on Unicode and what it means to developers, please see Joel's article. It is a good briefing on the problem that Unicode solves, and addresses the basics.

As mentioned in other programming related posts, my company's primary products are developed using Delphi 2007 for the Windows platform. One of the primary products is also supported on the Linux platform by using Free Pascal.

Recently, CodeGear released a new version of Delphi - 2009. Doing some research on the product, it appears as if they have made a fairly significant change to the language. In previous versions, the string type was an AnsiString, which means that one characters takes up one byte of memory. In the 2009 version, the string type is now mapped to a UnicodeString. Since a Unicode string can have one of several types of encoding which map one character to one or more bytes, it is possible that this change may drastically affect any legacy Delphi application which processes strings, especially if it is a library which is used by other applications.

Thankfully, CodeGear has provided developers with three articles {part 1, part 2, part 3} detailing the changes made, and gotchas to look out for when porting legacy applications over to Delphi 2009. Please take a look at these articles to see what the potential obstacles are when moving your applications over, and consider the difficulties. Third party components will most likely also need to be tweaked to work with Delphi 2009, so keep that in mind as well. You can find PBear's HTML viewer updated for Delphi 2009 here, along with other free components.

As far as Free Pascal is concerned, Unicode support and compatibility is something that they are currently hashing through. Until a Delphi 2009 Unicode compatibility mode can be implemented in Free Pascal, we will be forced to stick with Delphi 2007 for the time being.